A comprehensive survey on Segment Routing Traffic Engineering

Abstract

Traffic Engineering (TE) enables management of traffic in a manner that optimizes utilization of network resources in an efficient and balanced manner. However, existing TE solutions face issues relating to scalability and complexity. In recent years, Segment Routing (SR) has emerged as a promising source routing paradigm. As one of the most important applications of SR, Segment Routing Traffic Engineering (SR-TE), which enables a headend to steer traffic along specific paths represented as ordered lists of instructions called segment lists, has the capability to overcome the above challenges due to its flexibility and scalability. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey on SR-TE. A thorough review of SR-TE architecture is provided in the first place, reviewing the core components and implementation of SR-TE such as SR Policy, Flexible Algorithm and SR-native algorithm. Strengths of SR-TE are also discussed, as well as its major challenges. Next, we dwell on the recent SR-TE researches on routing optimization with various intents, e.g., optimization on link utilization, throughput, QoE (Quality of Experience) and energy consumption. Afterwards, node management for SR-TE are investigated, including SR node deployment and candidate node selection. Finally, we discuss the existing challenges of current research activities and propose several research directions worth of future exploration.

Keywords

• Segment routing
• Traffic engineering
• SR Policy
• Routing optimization
• Segment list computation